One Man's Journey with the New Dodge Grand Caravan
July 26, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments
The rest stop was deserted, just a couple of semis comatose in the truck lot down the steep hill at the edge of the car lot up top near the restroom and vending machines. Western Maryland, black under the midnight sky, there was a lightning storm 20 or so miles to the north and I stood there watching for a few minutes while my traveling partner, ManoftheHouse.com Community Manager Jeff Pugh, stretched his legs and threw out the trash. I hadn't slept the night before - a couple hours tops - and expected to be much more sleepy than I was. Still, we thought, it would probably be a good idea to stop for the night near Cumberland, where our Google map told us to get off I-64 and take backroads southeast to Winchester, Virginia, the official starting point of our test drive of the 2011 Dodge Grand Caravan CREW.
It's hard to say a lot of nice things about a mini van. For most of us, buying one is an act of surrender—of our adolescent dreams, to family obligation over selfish wants, to practicality over style—and I am certainly no exception. I remember our first van, a used 1999 Ford Windstar that my wife bought while I was in Vegas for a friend's bachelor party. She was pregnant at the time, a couple months from giving birth to our first child, and feeling the need to become more domesticated. I argued that we keep her Volkswagen Beetle—it was only a year old—but she insisted that the van would be best for our child and my old English Springer Spaniel, Quigley. In the long view of things, she was right, but at the time I felt like I was somehow betraying my masculine ideal. I was less bitter when, five years later, we upgraded our unreliable and uncomfortable Windstar for a 2006 Honda Odyssey. That was the van she wanted in the first place, but it was out of the price range of a teacher and writer. I can't say I was ever excited about the Honda, but it was better than what we had and, by that time, I had already sacrificed my dreams for family.
Spend any time in the suburbs and you'll quickly realize that the Odyssey and the Toyota Sienna are de rigeur for the public pool and Little League set. Drive around the town where I live and you'd think they were delivered to new residents by the Welcome Wagon. I get it. They're comfortable and practical. And, while I have opinions about the style of the new Odyssey, they don't look that bad. But, you get the sense that they were clearly designed with women in mind. Our Odyssey isn't feminine, but it has a certain Pottery Barn feel to it—the way the roof angles, the unoffensive grill, the polite lines that try to make you think parenting can be hip after all. We had ours a week before taking it on a 22-hour road trip to Disney World. It was comfortable on that trip, but I don't remember stopping in the middle of the night and not realizing I had been in a van. I was (and still am) cramped in the front seat with a baby seat in the middle row, and the driver's seat is flat, which is comfortable for short trips but leads to fatigue on longer trips.
NEXT: Our Drive
